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Thursday, February 4, 2016

Into the Prairie Echo

Spending a small amount of time with my 85,000 word Oklahoma memoir, a draft that's been silent on my computer for three years now. I come across two excerpts that resonate today:

A
bison bull is standing 30 feet from the car. Straight on, it looks narrow
though quite tall. The perspective changes when he slides to his right and gives
us the long, full angle of his body shedding the winter coat. A massive hump of
muscle on his back supports his equally massive head as it sways back and forth
over grass, dipping into the sinew of blades and blooms like a wobbly pumpjack.
I’ve never been this close to a bison. I’ve read enough stories to know to stay
in the car – a mature bull can weigh up to 2,000 pounds, more than half this
sedan.

I’m snapping a photo every five
seconds in a gap between the A-pillar and my wife, who is leaning all the way
back in the passenger seat while she balances her camera out the window. I’d
seen a herd in the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in northeastern Oklahoma, but
that was at a distance of a half mile. I want to reach out and touch this
bull’s crown, which is like a mane right behind his horns – it’s as fluffy
looking as a shag rug. Occasionally I can see his eyes, big and dark, but
dwarfed by his forehead. I can’t tell if he’s looking at me, or just coming up
for visual air. I can hear him eating. I can hear him eating.

-----------------------------

There’s
an emptiness in the Plains. It’s not a literal emptiness because it is our
absence which is most present. And yet our existence has redefined the absence:
you can get lost in a corn field, lay down in the wheat and just vanish—no one
will ever find you.

It’s a dangerous thing being lost to
the horizon. Walking any open field we are both compass point and sun dial,
searching for home in the time allotted us on this earth. At most we will
discover that while alive we’re as ethereal as a memory. Cross paths with a
mountain lion or sandhill crane or butterfly or prairie dog and we will know
the silence we carry inside, the silence we insist upon field after field.
There’s nothing here because we made it so. Our absence is present in the rows
stretching to infinity off the highways and county roads.

But stop. A dung beetle is moving
from shadow to shadow underneath the sunflowers, pushing its brown marble over
pebbles, past cracks, and through thick brush. When I was a kid I’d sit near an
ant hill—the inverse funnel pushing out ants like a great heart pumping blood.
Each body scatters in every direction, following the marked trails out beyond
the center of their lives. Can you imagine being an ant or a dung beetle? Can
you imagine? You have never been anything else, following the narrow path laid
out for you, but pushing your burdens before you like they were the only
treasure you’d ever had. When we enter the earth from another perspective we
become our truest selves—we give up the right to take away other lives and
enter into an unwritten contract that we signed at our births. We are here,
made of the same stuff as everything else. We are here for only a moment, too,
already absent in our presence until we go mad with the terror of our short
lives and break the contract. The only way to rewrite ourselves is to walk the
horizon, with seed in hand, until the prairie comes back.

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Why hello there. Fancy meeting you on the bottom of the page. You should be well aware that everything on this page is copyrighted, and if I find it elsewhere--uncredited and with no permission from me--I will come after you, and you will lose. It's the law. Now you know.